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American Ballads and Folk Songs |
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"Here is that second verse of the 'Little Doughies':
"In the morning we throw off the bedground, Aiming to graze them an hour or two, When they are full you think you can drive them On to the trail, but be damned if you do.
Singing Hoop-li-6 Get along my little doughies, For Wyoming will be your new home. And it's driving and damning and cursing those doughies To our misf orttme but none of their own,
"It took me about half an hour to make sure of the capricious melody. We sat under a live oak in McCulloch County, Texas, some twenty miles from Brady City, in March, 1893. I made the boy sing it until I had taken the notes down with the words under them. He sang in 6/8 time, andante, dwelling according to whim on certain unexpected syllables: Those I have either underlined (for a short hold) or marked with a circumflex accent indicating a note often prolonged through several measures.
"The music resembles very slightly the tune you sing, and nothing else at all that I know. It's altogether the wildest I have met in print or in open air; and whatever it was originally, the open air and the plains and the night have played their part in giving it the shape I succeeded in capturing. It may well be that the young fellow had music in his soul, and that what he gave me had touches of his
own."
Mr. Wister adds a note on the manuscript of the music: "Just from habit I write 'doughies.' Remember that the above melody varies so much according to the caprice of the singer (not in intervals but in holding a note when he feels like it) that writing it down has to be approximate." Mr. Wister's tune is the second example as printed on pp. 386—7. |
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